Living Footy

Living Footy

Fans live footy. They fall into its clutches and are happy to be tossed about in a state of battered uncertainty. It’s all about hope and joy and other important stuff. No wonder footy is such an attractive topic for writers and thinkers! Join Yvette Wroby, Kerrie Soraghan and John Harms as they try to make sense of their passion.

We all know the place of football in the life of this community, this city, this nation. Whether you’re in the grip of footy or not, you can’t help but see the impact it has on people. It consumes them. Us! Reasonable, intelligent, capable people. Three footy fans, intrigued by the depth of their own feeling, have spent a lot of time thinking about what footy means to them – and writing of their own experience.

Kerrie Soraghan is the bard of the Western Bulldogs Football Club. For many years she has written a weekly report for her blog The Bulldog Tragician where she describes the way her life and football are so entwined. When the Bulldogs won the flag last year – their first in 62 years – she used those lyrical pieces as the basis of her book The Mighty West. She describes a way of being and a state of mind which rings true for footy fans.

Yvette Wroby is a psychotherapist, artist and cartoonist, and now writer, who recently published her first book Siren’s Call which is the story of her two families: her natural family and her St Kilda Football Club family. In 2015 Yvette went to every St Kilda game around the country. As is Yvette’s way, she met so many footy people. In Siren’s Call she describes their passion, and her own, while weaving into her memoir the story of her elderly mother whose family was forced to escape Europe at the time of World War II.

Kerrie and Yvette will be joined by John Harms who wrote about being a footy fan in Loose Men Everywhere which is now one of the three books which make up the omnibus Play On. His interest in the meaning of football motivated him to establish the popular site www.footyalmanac.com.au which has attracted over 1000 contributors – all trying to make sense of their passion.

Come and help them make sense of it all at the ‘Living Footy’ conversation.